Ekaterina M. (EIE) - heightened emotionality, expressiveness, tragic tone

Since early childhood, I’ve had very strong emotions.

<...> If we’re talking about the state of emotional ecstasy that I sometimes get into — it’s right on the verge of hysterics, you want to cry because you’re giving your emotions away and the person is absorbing them. From the outside it looks naïve, but it brings me joy; it makes me want to live. Sometimes emotions just tear me apart. I walk around in pieces, unable to pull myself together.

Negative emotions are the result of past failures. When these emotions come up, you start remembering not only the failures that caused them, but other failures too, and you feel like a complete zero. When I couldn’t do something, or wasn’t allowed to do something — I didn’t cry, didn’t scream, I just sat quietly with my emotions. It’s like someone is shading over a blank white sheet with a thick black pencil. Like a big house collapsing, everything flying to pieces, nothing left. Like the dust rising from the collapse swallowing people, suffocating them until they die. And then add to that the suffering of their loved ones, and the suffering of those who sympathize, and even the suffering of the world’s press… Maybe there’s mourning not just in one city or country… And all this is accompanied by nuclear explosions, terrorists shooting at the same house, at everyone who was near it or not so near — but will die anyway. All of it accompanied by people screaming, shrieking, and a deafening explosion in your head… That’s the intensity my emotions can reach.

If you start doing something and everything in your way gets cut off — that’s what the emotions are like. Or when adults stubbornly can’t understand what I want, why I said or did something — just a wall.

And ordinary irritated emotions — for example, like when a child approaches a lion’s cage, the bars are wide, and the lion lunges through them at the person, and you see that roaring maw. No need to visualize further — everything’s clear without any gory details. That’s the emotion. You want to say with your emotions: “If this happens to me, you’ll regret it. You’ll blame yourselves later. Better not! I’m worried about you!”

<...> Once a neighbor girl upset me. I had two big rubber bouncy balls, about ten–fifteen centimeters in diameter — one red and one pinkish. I gave her the pink one to play with and left, and when I came back she told me she lost it. I was so angry, so upset, that I brought my hand with the red bouncy ball to my mouth and bit it with all my strength. I tried to stop the rising hysteria. The ball kept the marks of my teeth. I kept that ball for a long time, as a memory of that tragic day.